When Losing is Fun

"Don't talk about WAR Blog Club" is both the first and second rule of WAR Blog Club. So I'm not even going to say anything about it.

Except to mention that rule 8, I think, requires us all to blog about what server types we want to play on.

Server Types in WoW

In WoW I went Alliance. Partly because my friends wanted to go alliance, partly because I wanted to be a gnome (I love small races). It was ok most of the time except for one thing : Battlegrounds. Since the Alliance outnumbered the Horde, the Alliance would wait forever on BGs while the Horde would get right in. Cross-server queues helped a good deal but Alliance still had to wait for many battlegrounds.

For all the theories about why Horde beat Alliance in battlegrounds, I've never heard what I think is the simplest : the Horde have more practice. Not so much anymore, but back in the day a Horde character could, in 3 hours, play nearly 3 hours of PvP. An alliance character with three hours probably wouldn't spend more than 2 hours playing for every three they tried.

So here we see the outnumbered players with a distinct advantage in a controlled environment. Not just an advantage that lets them win -- an advantage that lets them play the game more than their opponents.

Losing in TF2

The only FPS I've played in the past year is TF2. I'm out of practice now -- back when I was playing I was a fair player. I was good enough to lead the losing team in kills but not good enough to lead the winning team in kills.

In this game, like in many FPS games, it's a little more fun for me to lose. See, when I'm winning, my teammates are running around, competent, slaying our foes left and right. You can probably see how that makes the game really boring for me.

But losing -- ah -- sweet losing. If you are losing (and not totally getting rolled, just losing) you have what the military likes to call "a target-rich environment". There are just so many people to kill and it's so much fun. Plus, unlike being on the winning side, it's easier to feel like you are making a difference.

So in TF2, it's fun to lose.

Losing in Warhammer : Age of Reckoning

I can almost feel what it's like to lose in WAR right now. It's this sixth sense I have about games. Where were we?

Oh yes. As I mentioned previously, there seems to be an advantage to being on the smaller side of a faction war server with controlled PvP. I also mentioned previously that I think it's more fun to lose than it is to win.

So who's going to be outnumbered? Who's going to be losing RvR? My faction, Order, that's who.

Also I'm going core since (as this post makes clear) I totally despise PvP servers.

Since I'll be one of the only people playing Core Order I'll probably need to come up with some good guild names. My favorites so far are "Lonely", preferably spelled "L O N E L Y", and also "THE Core Order Guild".